understanding – KNOM Radio Missionhttp://www.knom.org/wp
96.1 FM | 780 AM | Yours for Western AlaskaFri, 18 Aug 2017 00:44:50 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.159285469A Letter to All Storytellershttp://www.knom.org/wp/blog/2015/01/02/a-letter-to-all-storytellers/
http://www.knom.org/wp/blog/2015/01/02/a-letter-to-all-storytellers/#commentsFri, 02 Jan 2015 19:34:16 +0000http://www.knom.org/wp/?p=13801As the Story49 producer, Kristin's job is to give Western Alaska a chance to tell their stories. Here, she writes an open letter to you about the power of sharing what you've lived.]]>

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it to yourself or to someone else.”-Margaret Atwood

* * *

Dear Storytellers,

That’s you. That’s everyone. It’s the man you hurriedly passed on Front Street and the woman next to you in the line at the Post Office. It’s that student in your class who doesn’t say a word and that customer who keeps you talking an hour after they’ve made their purchase. Those storytellers.

And now is when you begin to think:

Me? A storyteller? But what story do I have to tell?

You go a step further and think what many people have said to me:

But I haven’t lived anything special. I’ve lived an ordinary life.

Well, then.

Tell what it’s like to fall on the ice, to fall in love, to fall to rock bottom. What about that time you lost your wallet? Or that other time you lost yourself? What happened on the day you’ll never forget and on the day you’d do anything to forget? Tell what it felt like to catch your first fish or to catch up with an old friend.

I will not beg you to tell your story, it is yours, after all.There may be memories too painful to relive, secrets you’re taking to the grave. Maybe you enjoy the peacefulness of privacy and revel in the power of silence. I can understand that.

Even I, a sharer of too many things and a keeper of very few of my own secrets, know when to hold a story for myself. How magical it is to revisit a memory in my mind and my mind alone, free of the twists and distortions of retelling and re-creation.

So, for those reasons, and certainly more, I will not beg you to tell your story. But I will beg you to remember this:

Your life is extraordinary solely because you are the only one in this entire world who has lived it exactly as you have.

So let’s say you share it. And you’re speaking the words aloud and you begin to realize things about yourself and your life that you’ve never noticed before. And maybe someone will hear your story because you were brave enough to share it, and your words will reverberate in their ears and resonate deeply within them. Maybe they live next door, or maybe they live across the globe, but they see a piece of their existence wound and woven into yours, and suddenly they don’t feel so alone.

It could be that your story makes people think in ways they never have before, maybe it inspires them, maybe it answers some long-standing questions they’ve been pondering. Or maybe it just makes them laugh on a really bad day. That’s a good enough story for me.

So I ask you, not as a story collector but as a fellow human being:

Share the stories you can. Keep the stories you’re not ready to release yet. Share the stories that have been waiting timidly on the tip of your tongue. Share the stories you may not know you have. Shout them from the rooftops, across the frozen sea. Write them down and give them to a loved one. Tell a really bad story. Tell it again. Okay, maybe try it with a different crowd. Share what you have learned and what you still want to learn. Tell what you want the world to know, the story you want to outlive you.

Here’s to a world of greater understanding and compassion built by storytellers. That’s you. That’s everyone.

Sincerely, Kristin

P.S. And if you feel like sharing a story with me, any story at all, email story49@knom.org

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http://www.knom.org/wp/blog/2015/01/02/a-letter-to-all-storytellers/feed/313801A Few Notes on Livinghttp://www.knom.org/wp/blog/2014/10/21/a-few-notes-on-living/
Tue, 21 Oct 2014 21:01:58 +0000http://www.knom.org/wp/?p=12435"What is this year going to mean?" volunteer Jenn asks. "Who are we going to be next year when the days start to grow longer again, when the icy, liquid-metal sea melts back to blue?"]]>

I spoke with a man in Unalakleet. The name’s not important to remember, he said, except that it’s his grandfather’s name. We sat at a library table in the school, 9:30 at night. He was explaining to me what this one Inupiaq word meant—at least, explaining to the best of my understanding—my limited, English-language-only understanding of the world. An understanding that I know is so limited, especially here. Since I arrived in Alaska, I’ve felt incapable of using my language to accurately explain what I’m seeing, thinking, feeling, understanding. It just…doesn’t translate.

And this brings me back to Unalakleet. The library table. The words, but more, the understanding. He explained through stories, through at least 15 minutes of stories and comparisons and inverses, what this one word meant. And after all that, I think I started to understand, though I could never explain it again myself.

I asked him (I asked myself, maybe, and likely the universe) how I could ever do my job the right way. Just as there is no easy translation of a word (a belief, a truth) from Inupiaq into English, there is no way to convey through my medium—the news—all that I have been able to experience through living, temporarily, amid the stories I’m trying to tell. I was in Unalakleet for two days: a place I never knew existed four months ago, and is now a piece of my reality, a tiny piece of my understanding that will always live in me, deep down, shifting perhaps half a degree my perception of the world in a way I’ll probably never do it justice by explaining.

Or last night, midnight, at the kitchen table in the volunteer house. Rolling over in our minds and shaking off the dust through conversation: what is this year going to mean? Who are we going to be next year when the days start to grow longer again—when 10 a.m. is cast back into sunlight? When the icy, liquid-metal sea melts back to blue. When we remember again how hard it was to fillet a fish, how hard it is to fall asleep in the light, the aurora borealis like a dream that danced over our porch. When we depart, maybe, from the only people who will understand what all that felt like—while we sit here now at the kitchen table, fingers wrapped around warm ceramic mugs, seeing reflected in each other’s tired eyes the question of how we’ll even experience it the first time.

I think there is a sacredness in certain moments that cannot be conveyed without direct experience. That the closest I can come to telling a good story is through being immersed in the story myself, and that most days, I gain so much more than I am capable of giving, and learn so much more than I am capable of communicating. All I can be, now, is grateful for the people who are sharing all of the living with me.

The sky is made of cotton candy and the sea is strawberry milk.

10 a.m. sunrise

Our frosted jack-o’-lanterns survived the first October snowfall in Nome.

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what they have already achieved, but what they aspire to.”
-Khalil Gibran

]]>4865Daily Quote: Albert Einsteinhttp://www.knom.org/wp/blog/2012/12/04/daily-quote-albert-einstein/
Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:59 +0000http://www.knom.org/morning/wp/?p=548“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling Man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.”
– Albert Einstein, 1937
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